- DECLAN
I handed her the laptop—a ruggedized, top-tier ThinkPad that didn't look like much but had enough processing power to crack a small bank. She took it like it was a holy relic. The second her fingers touched the keys, that "lost girl" look she’d been carrying around just evaporated.
"The metadata is the key," she muttered, her eyes already reflecting the blue glow of the screen. "Caspian won't look at the design. He’ll look at the file architecture. If I nest the message in the hex code of the image layers, it’ll look like a corrupted file to anyone else. To him, it’s a map."
"You're sure he’s still monitoring that old server?" I asked, leaning against the kitchen island.
"Caspian doesn't let things go, Declan. He’s like a dog with a bone." She tapped a rapid-fire rhythm on the
